And to this she replied—­

“I shall be thankful, for I cannot bear this awful place longer.  I believe they must torture the women here.  They will torture me some day.  Do your best to get me out of here and I will tell you everything.  But,” she wrote, “I fear you can never secure my release.  I am confined here on a life sentence.”

“But you are English, and if you have had no trial I can complain to our Ambassador.”

“No, I am a Russian subject.  I was born in Russia, and went to England when I was a girl.”

That altered the case entirely.  As a subject of the Czar in her own country she was amenable to that disgraceful blot upon civilization that allows a person to be consigned to prison at the will of a high official, without trial or without being afforded any opportunity of appeal.  I therefore at once saw a difficulty.

Yet she promised to tell me the truth if I could but secure her release!

A flood of recollections of the amazing mystery swept through my mind.  A thousand questions arose within me, all of which I desired to ask her, but there, in that noisome prison-house, it was impossible.  As I stood there a woman’s shrill scream of excruciating pain reached me, notwithstanding those cyclopean walls.  Some unfortunate prisoner was, perhaps, being tortured and confession wrung from her lips.  I shuddered at the unspeakable horrors of that grim fortress.

Could I allow this refined defenseless girl to remain an inmate of that Bastille, the terrors of which I had heard men in Russia hint at with bated breath?  They had willfully maimed her and deprived her of both hearing and the power of speech, and now they intended that she should be driven mad by that silence and loneliness that must always end in insanity.

“I have decided,” I said suddenly, turning to the woman who had conducted me there, and having now removed the steel bonds of the prisoner with a key she secretly carried, stood with folded hands in the calm attitude of the religious.

“You will not act with rashness?” she implored in quick apprehension.  “Remember, your life is at stake, as well as my own.”

“Her enemies intended that I, too, should die!” I answered, looking straight into those deep mysterious brown eyes which held me as beneath a spell.  “They have drawn her into their power because she had no means of defense.  But I will assume the position of her friend and protector.”

“How?”

“The man is awaiting me in the boat outside.  I intend to take her with me.”

“But, m’sieur, why that is impossible!” cried the old woman in a hoarse voice.  “If you were discovered by the guards who patrol the lake both night and day they would shoot you both.”

“I will risk it,” I said, and without another word dashed into the tiny bed chamber and tore an old brown blanket from off the narrow truckle bed.

Then, linking my arm in that of the woman whose lovely countenance had verily become the sun of my existence, I made a sign, inviting her to accompany me.